Madame Antoinette Sterling

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume XX, Issue 6711, 29 June 1893, Page 2

Madame Antoinette Sterling

THE QUEEN OF CONTRALTOS. A contemporary states that Madame Sterling's divine dower, and by aid of incessant Study, application, and faithful effort, has achieved a height which none other to-day can touch. She challenges no comparison with operatic stars. Nature endowed her with that range of voice which is inseperable from sweet and homely music, from the songs we love the hest, and from which we learn and gain the most. Queen of Contraltos is Madame Sterling's well-known title, singer of ballads and home songs. All her early life was homely. In a simple, well-ordered Puritan-Presbyterian household, in a village of New York State, she passed all her childhood's years. She understood their sorrows and their joys, and was, from the knowledge which comes of personal experience, qiuiliiiud to join with poet and composer in their interpretation. Thirty years ago she was singing amongst her native woods, rejoicing in the glory of the Pentecostal spring, in the pageant of summer, the infinite beauty of autumn, and the solemn majesty of winter, its hill tops " massed with pines," its lowlands shrouded with snow. Boston discovered her genius, and, following the advice »f Boston critic*, she journeyed to the old world, and gave all her mind to following the instruction of the best teachers of the time. Her triumphal debut was in England, where for full twenty years now she his been held a» the one supreme singer of those songs which come from the lives and appeal directly to the hearts of the people. Madame Sterling come 3 to us now with her reputation at the full, and her treasurehouse of old ballads and folksong enriched by songs wherein poet, composer and singer have met and worked together. We ure to hear from her the music whose interpretative power satisfied such writers as Tennyson, Longfellow, and Kingsley, such composers as Hullah and Sulliran. All that was intended when " Th« Three Fishers," " Caller Herrin," and " The Lost Chord," were written will be experienced on the occasion of Madame Sterling's concert in Cisborne ou Fi iday night next. Opportunity and privilege are here suroly which will not b» lightly »r generally missed. Th« times are perhaps strenuous and their obligations many, but stilPwe cannot afford to miss such education and delight us this when once in a lifetime it if! brought to oar doors. The closing nights of her porformances in Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney, were marked by scenes of considcrab'e enthusiasm. Numbers were turned from the doors, and crowds gathered merely to catch % glimpse i of the famous can'atrice, who has speedily I established herself as a warm favorite with Australian audiences. Antoinette Stirling | comes to show us how a perfect Toice, perfectly educated, and controlled by a perceptive devotional and feeling mind, can lead us to heights and breadths and lengths and depths of musical delight such as we have not before understood. Madame Sterling is best known to popular fame as a ballad singer. A simple seeming phrase, but conveying to the initiated that which ia hard to be expressed. Far the ballad in perfection is beauty, It tells its story of pathos, passion, sorrow or joy, with fulness, and yet in fewest words. It admits of no elaborations. It is simple as the simple curve, yet how seldom is the human hand or voice created that can draw the one or render the other.